Engineering Design

Looking for a fun but serious introduction to the engineering process? Read a story! A ten-page passage introduces vocabulary and practices. Worksheets and templates provide support.

In “Calvin Builds a Guinea Pig Cage,” a child:

1. defines a problem, including a goal statement, criteria, and constraints

2. conducts research, brainstorms, and chooses a solution

3. designs and builds a prototype

4. tests, identifies failure points, redesigns, and conducts a fair test

Through a simple story, kids explore standards-based terminology and processes. It’s great for the beginning of the year – or whenever!

Fun magic show activities challenge kids to design tricks with magnets. Kids learn to define engineering problems with needs or wants, criteria, and constraints. Then they create six science-based illusions.

Have some fun with roller coasters! Students design, test, and refine a device that converts potential to kinetic energy (and vice versa). Physics activities focus on transfer, or transformation, from one form of energy to another.

Materials include plastic tubing and BBs.

Students learn to define a problem, identify criteria and constraints, brainstorm, build a prototype, design and carry out a fair test. Each STEM activity focuses on ways to reduce impacts of natural disasters (floods, volcanoes, erosion, tsunamis, earthquakes).

Which vehicles are best for the environment? Students research or read about fuel types and compare them. As a culmination to the environmental science project, they participate in a STEM activity and design their own “green” cars.

In this set of hydroponics activities, kids explore what plants need. They germinate seeds in baggies, learn about photosynthesis, review the engineering design process, participate in a STEM challenge, and write to support a claim that plants get what they need mainly from air and water.

After learning about motion in the ocean, fourth and fifth grade students use the engineering design process to build their own simulators. This STEM challenge focuses on transverse waves.

This interdisciplinary project merges science, engineering design, and writing. Kids define problems with needs, criteria, and constraints; analyze weather-related hazards and solutions; develop opinions with claims and evidence; and write paragraphs. As a culmination, they design solutions themselves.